


For Your Service, With Thanks

by Hikario



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Post-Series, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:20:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hikario/pseuds/Hikario
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rules of the Ellimist prevent him from saving his children's lives. He spends eternity giving them every other salvation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Your Service, With Thanks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pressdbtwnpages](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pressdbtwnpages/gifts).



The human children were remembered more strongly than most.

Even when the game would end, when a thousand-thousand champions and chess pieces would play their part in the dance, when Crayak would cease to be and before my own cessation, I remembered them most.

The upward arc of my being, which would be called immortality by humans, would naturally lead higher and higher in consciousness, and before I too end I achieve something more than timelessness- a breaking through the dimension of time, to swim in it like the sea, to transcend it, not merely forward and back and touching the physical dimension but traversing dimensions of existence that gradually coalesced into planes and planes above time.

All time was now, and I was in all time.

Perhaps it is their place at the beginning of the game. Perhaps I am a fool, and every life I see is just as precious to me, but the me making this observation is simply the me that loves them best.

“I” and “me” are tricky concepts when existent across all time and dozens of dimensions.

Whatever, however, they are remembered by me.

Closer to my cessation, not forward in time but forward in another dimension completely, in a burst of nostalgia and empathy and love I spend a very large infinity reliving my time with them, the original points of contact traversed again and again more times than numbers exist, changing everything and changing nothing, for any change I make is less consequential and permanent than lifting a stone from the ground, and then placing it back down.

There is no weave of the tapestry that allowed them all they deserve and all they gave me. Every possible change and intervention was measured and checked and tested by me, every meticulous molecular nudge and every universe-shattering cataclysmic possibility.

The beauty and perfection in creation will never cease to amaze me- how it happened first is almost exactly how it needed to be, the perfect homeostasis of all existence a finer calibrated instrument than even I can create or understand, let alone rebalanced and change.

There is so little I can change, yet all I can possibly do for them, I do.

 

~*~

 

Rachel was the first.

I have already given her a gift, my younger self did, in the form of a story and two answers in a frozen moment. Her greatest desire, her greatest validation. It is with this act that I inspire myself, for all the Animorphs have given just as much of themselves to me, my game, to rightness.

 

Tobias should be next; he too was touched, time and again by my younger self. But to freeze him at the moment of his death would be an injury, no question or thought or process of the intellect will be a gift to him in that moment. I move on.

 

~*~

 

Jake the leader took long, careful consideration.

Jake wanted so strongly, felt such a driving passion which he believed to be born of love and duty and friends and family. I recognized it, echoed in great leaders and makers of history; it was a drive inherent to himself. He was a glowing star, born with that lucky terrible curse that makes greatness, that emerges organically within life only when great things are needed.

My gift to him is in increments, a million hormones gently stirred across the tiny span of time that his life straddles. A multiplication, sparingly, or a soft stroke of a neuron to bend or break or create a chain of thought at its elemental electrical root form.

At a million moments in time I reach out and calm him, spur him, encourage or sooth, like a parent stroking their sleeping child's hair through a feverish night terror.

The course of Jake's life is unchanged, but in tiny, tiny, subconscious ways I give him peace, give him confidence and a sense of right and achievement.

I am rewarded when at last I watch his death. Once, he died with a gasp, anticipating and tense and unsure behind Rachel's razor-sharp smile.

At the last, he dies exhaling. A sigh, a breath, a release.

 

Tobias knew so much less happiness before he became an Animorph. Living tempered him. He lived with so much less peace to begin with, and though his mind was beautiful and generous his spark was different, smaller in drive and bigger in soul and heart than Jake. Tiny changes could not comfort him; I could not reshape his life to soften the bite, lest I remake and destroy all that is good in him.

Again, I move on.

 

~*~

 

My gift to Marco seems at first easy. Marco, bringer of laughter and sturdiest support, is given immortality.

The path of his life I leave unchanged. Fifty years past, I come to a young film maker in a dream. She does not remember what inspired her masterpiece, a critically acclaimed biopic on Earth's Greatest Heroes, and especially the boy who filmed hours and hours of daytime television and film and interview. It spreads around the world, proliferating stories and legends and rediscoveries and art, until Marco is echoed in Odysseus, in Mercutio, in Harry Potter, in all the great and timeless legends before and to come.

Stories are wily and unpredictable beings, wildfires that take a life their own. I did not anticipate the voracity of Marco's story. I nearly unravel all of history yet made as his story infects billions and billions of youth over the millennia, twining their strands of space-time like overgrown brambles and shredding the fabrics of reality with their new-forged paths.

Revision is an embarrassment to me, thankfully private. I must erase all but the faintest echo of the inspiration I implanted, so subtle that it is a dozen generations before it breaks ground in any form of art, weak enough to live only a few decades before fading into the obscure dead collective unconscious of human culture.

A hundred thousand years later, a species at the cusp of radio technology catches the wave that I have shepherded across galaxies, gently nudging a single transmission through a safe harbour free of interference and radiation and consuming gravity wells. I guide it to this alien world that is ready, which needs and deserves joy and inspiration and guidance.

Marco takes root in the gods of this world, in all their stories and all their legends. He bestows a lightness and a joy that permeates their whole culture, that make them a great people who revere and remember and celebrate the echo of him.

 

The sort of ripple that is right for Marco seems meaningless for Tobias, and I feel a pulse of frustration. I am too close to these children, too close for a god whose idle frustrations can unwittingly rend the stars, but I have committed myself to their debt, to my thanks, to their happiness.

Once more I move on.

 

~*~

 

In Cassie's life lies a gift to myself.

She lived so, so much longer than any of the others- less than a blink of my own life, but for her, so long. There is so much wisdom in her, and so little need. She is generous, more generous than I can ever be.

I give Cassie little miracles, and because of who she is, I tell her I am doing so.

We have many, many conversations throughout her life. I halt time to intervene when she is scrambling to save the life of a wounded Taxxon in the Amazon jungle at the age of 26. I guide her to the bleed which she would not have otherwise found, the bleed that would have left the poor being incapacitated and vulnerable and with half its brain for the rest of its life. I follow all possible conclusions to the end of existence to ward off dangerous consequences, then assured, I show myself to her.

When she asks, or when she needs, in saving a life or helping an unfortunate I tell her what she needs to know. Nine tenths of the time, I must tell her no, this must be so, and together we are sad.

“You don't have to do this” she observes over tea in her home, aged 78; I take great pleasure in forming myself new and physically impossible taste buds with which to savor the little cookies she baked for me.

“I do not” I agree between bites. Our companionship is as much a gift to myself as to her.

“I'm grateful, don't get me wrong.”

“You know why.” We have this conversation often.

Reminding me of her gratitude is reminding me that I am doing something unnecessarily kind. It is how she cares for me; reminding me of my resilient remaining humanity, what shred of Ketran mortality still lingers.

Cassie lived such a long and happy life, and I am selfish as I am kind in sharing it with her.

 

Tobias lived so briefly.

I move on.

 

~*~

 

I have saved Aximili for last, for it is no challenge to grace his life with a blessing, and it serves many other purposes. I need not linger so intently on the consequence.

But I have yet to completely understand Tobias, and so I wait, and come to Aximili before him.

The One are a threat, much like something I've known before, and they are not part of the old game. The One is a thing that could become like Crayak or Myself. I have studied it, and I dislike it, and I have made an enemy of it.

Aximili is already a war hero, and it takes so little to bolster his courage in his last moment before he is bonded. I almost share my presence with him, but that is just my ego; he did not need me before, he does not need me now, and what I do is for his legacy as much as his conscious self.

Aximili's mind becomes a virus in The One. A will just strong enough to retain an invisible separation of It and Not It. It is a presence in The One, part of it, but not completely It.

Aximili the war hero continues to fight against The One for a very long time, and when finally It is ended by happenstance, vulnerability, and a great coalition of sentient forces, Aximili goes to his end at the height of victory. He dies, indispensable to the victors and heralded heroic.

 

Tobias's end is fixed. I turn myself now to that end. I move on.

 

~*~

 

I spend lifetimes considering Tobias.

Elfangor's son from a time I created, he is in a way my child as well. My grandson. I am still mortal in my biases and favorites, if little else.

In my bias I am clouded to the obvious, and in my bias I let myself remain clouded, for the infinite eons spent with the boy number among my best. I live through his life with him, again and again, to find his last gift. To find what he deserves.

Ultimately, his gift is the easiest, and I bend so little of reality to give it to him I almost feel cheated; moving stars would not feel grand enough after spending a large infinity of lifetimes with my children, my champions, my Animorphs.

All it takes is linking two moments in time, the tiniest increment that exists. Like connecting two live wires, the spark is instantaneous, the fusion at meeting glorious and bright and right.

Two small strands of space-time fading and curling in on themselves, pulled together, their tips joined and intertwined.

No rule is broken but the physics of time, which one discovers is a much less meaningful rule once you have transcended past the twelfth dimension.

In their last, they meet, together in time which transcends space.

I selfishly live the moment with them. I see through their eyes the looming specter of death.

Tobias sees a sterile metal ship, a looming threat, feels anticipation and impending fear, and then fire and void and darkness.

Rachel sees red, bleeding out in the frozen moment of listening, and I see myself telling my story, a story that ends here and now and then faintness and blurring shadows and then nothing.

They see each other next, and I them. I have not bent space, they are not together, but they are: in the same time, sharing time like no other being has ever done before. I have merged their timelines, I have done something new and unique and dangerous and right.

Behind them each is every moment of their lives laid bare and visible, to be lived and experienced as one turned backwards in a baffling inversion of the direction of all other consciousnesses.

At the point of meet there is no time for anything at all, no time for a smile or a gasp, only that purest connection of reunion stretching eternally, cyclically. In their permanent circular union I leave Tobias with Rachel, in a moment that can not go forward- both timelines push into the other, a head-on collision that halts them in a timeless forever.

Their reunion is eternal.

I live this moment with them once; only once, lest I am trapped in the sheer joy bursting from within them forever. In projections of their dying physical selves made whole by the force of their will, in the not-space like the knife-blade precipice of a black hole, they hang in time and space with gazes locked, discovering each other eternally.

I move on.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide! I was so happy to get this prompt, because my natural inclination is to wallow in existentialism and nihilism and angst and grief. Thank you for spurring me to write a fic in which my approach was "You know what? Let's make it all better"


End file.
